Sunday, February 28, 2016

ASM International's CEO Chuck Del Prado on 2015 ALD results

ASM International is the leading OEM for ALD and therefore interesting to follow in more detail. As announced here before on the ALD news blog, ASM International held an Q4/2015 earnings call on Wednesday 24 February. Here are some of the highlights with respect to ALD from that call. The full transcript of the call is available through Seeking Alpha (here). The webcast play back is also available at ASM´s web (here).

ASM International's (ASMI) CEO Chuck Del Prado on Q4 2015 Results:

“2015 was another year of success for our ALD business. Despite moderating conditions in the broader market during the year, momentum in the ALD market was again solid. On the back of a continued strong and leading position, we were able to take advantage of the growth in ALD demand, as evidenced by the double-digit growth in our net sales in 2015.“

ALD was again the key driver behind the growth in revenue in 2015 and accounted for clearly more than half of our total equipment revenue.

ASM has broadened their customer base beyond the traditional top three and had a growing contribution from the top 4 to top 10 customers.

The share of ALD of the total deposition equipment market will further increase.

More of the critical patterning steps at 10-nanometer will require spacer-defined double patterning based on single-wafer/mini-batch ALD.

“Multiple patterning also continues to be a key enabler for customers in the DRAM sector to transition to smaller geometries. At the next technology node, the number of multiple patterning layers is expected to further increase. We are well placed to support our DRAM customers in their ever increasing technology and productivity requirements as soon as equipment demand for the 1x node starts to pick up. In NAND flash, we have taken important steps in the past few years to strengthen our participation in next generations of 3D NAND device manufacturing. In the course of 2016, we expect to gradually increase the contribution from new 3D NAND applications.”

Chuck del Prado repeated the earlier statement made “as the market grows from $600 million in 2014 as a baseline to north of $1.2 billion 3, 4 years later, likely our percentage market share in ALD may go down somewhat” (see figure above).

Before answering questions on the Epi and Furnace market, Chuck del Prado also made a final statement whether EUV will have any impact on the projections of the market going from €600 million to €1.2 billion in the next 3 years to 4 years with 2014 as a baseline. According to del Prado It will take a number of years before EUV will be out in a real HVM mode and in the meantime, the patterning market will still grow in a significant way - “And based on that, we said clearly no.”